


time wants to happen

by Liu



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, ColdatomWeek2016, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 11:59:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6656947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liu/pseuds/Liu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Len has gone his whole life without a soulmark - when one suddenly appears on his body, he can't believe it. Especially not when he finds out who the owner of that mark is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	time wants to happen

Len can’t believe it. With shaky hands, he yanks his shirt down his torso again, as if he could protect himself from Gideon’s assessment. But the words are seared into his brain and he can’t help but hear them on repeat.

_That is most definitely a soulmark, Mr. Snart._

How can this be? Len has gone his whole life without one – he has made his peace with the fact that there’s no person magically created to fit his needs, that he’s damaged goods, a lone wolf without anyone genetically designed to be _his_.

And he’s fine with all that: he has Lisa, even when she’s across the continent from him, or across space and time, like now. He has Mick, or had - even when he didn’t, when they betrayed each other, when they aren’t even on speaking terms anymore. And he has himself, he has his resilience and his stubborn determination to prove his father wrong, to prove to anyone that he can do the impossible.

However, he never thought that the ‘impossible’ he’d achieve would be getting a soulmark at the age of forty-three. Most people get theirs when they hit puberty – a few rare cases have to wait until they’re twenty, maybe twenty-five, tops. Len has never heard of anyone who would get their soulmark at this age: his stomach roils a little when he imagines that his soulmate has just been born, forty-three years younger than Len. He feels bad for the little one, who will likely go through life with a useless mark on his body, one that will never bring him or her the soulmate they’ll keep looking for.

But Gideon’s not done – the carefully modulated voice sounds again: “The mark is an exact match for the one Mr. Palmer has.”

Len’s eyes go wide – there’s a moment when he’s sure his lungs have disappeared from his chest, leaving a vast emptiness behind and making it impossible to breathe, but in the next second, he’s drawing in a breath, a ragged, painful one, like oxygen doesn’t agree with his heart.

“No,” he says, but it’s futile – an AI that can re-grow his hand is probably not wrong about a mark clearly visible even to a human eye.

The question is, why now? Len did not have a soulmark on his body when they started this mission. How is it possible that all of a sudden, one appears across his hip – it’s not like Raymond was born a week ago, when Len’s skin started burning and itching, right before the mark itself surfaced, thin lines and loopy swirls covering his body up to his ribcage.

“I advise informing Mr. Palmer – this matter concerns him as well,” Gideon continues, and this time, Len sounds like he actually means it when he says another ‘No.’

“What concerns me?”

Len closes his eyes in a brief grimace of exasperation. Of course – of _course_ Raymond has to come here. Because Len’s life has been a bad primetime drama show ever since he agreed to step onto a goddamn time machine, and he can’t even have a moment of absolute helpless frustration without the object of his irritation walking in.

“Nothing,” he snaps, and Raymond gives him that sad, disappointed look that he has mastered. Len sneers and turns away.

“Well, Gideon thinks it’s _something_?” Raymond prods.

“Indeed, Mr. Palmer.”

“Mind telling me what it is?”

“Don’t you dare,” Len snaps and wishes he could glare in a specific direction at the AI – but of course, the stupid machine brain is not taking orders from _him_ and operates under that misguided notion of honesty being the best policy.

“Mr. Snart has just found out that he has recently acquired a soulmark.”

“Gideon,” Len pleads when he sees Raymond’s eyes shift to him, and impossibly zero in on the exact place his soulmark has manifested. He resists the urge to tug his shirt down, knowing full well that Raymond does not have any enhanced vision abilities that would allow him to see through the thick fabric of Len’s thermal shirt: but Raymond must piece it all together because all blood drains from his face a second before Gideon announces the horrible, ironic twist of their fates:

“It matches the soulmark found on your own body, Mr. Palmer.”

Len winces and averts his eyes, but he can hear Raymond’s gasp, he hears the shuffle of his feet as he staggers back, the thump as he more falls than sits on the recliner in the med bay.

“Not that thrilled about this either,” Len snarls and walks out of the room before Raymond has a chance to react.

…

Len won’t admit he’s hiding out – it’s not exactly easy to get lost in the confined spaces of a relatively small ship anyway. But whenever he needs a moment to collect himself, he comes down here instead of the sterile, impersonal sleeping quarters assigned to him. He’s spent too much of his life in various warehouses, and so the crates strewn around the storage space of the Waverider make him feel safer, more relaxed than the bare rooms or the cramped common area.

Raymond finds him eventually, and Len takes a childish moment to imagine ducking behind one large crate, pretending he’s not here. Wouldn’t work, so he doesn’t bother, just gives Raymond his coolest glare and fully expects the guy to turn around on his heel and walk out immediately.

He’s not exactly surprised, just a little irritated when Raymond crosses the space in a few long strides, movements a little strained, twitchy, as if he has to fight himself to sit down next to Len.

Len doesn’t move away only on principle; he was here first, and the petulant child in him doesn’t like to make concessions to his personal space.

“In case you’re wondering, I don’t want to talk about it,” he sneers, and Raymond isn’t even looking at him, but Len can feel something sad and dark in his posture, in the way he shifts ever so slightly.

“I think we should,” he says softly. Len rolls his eyes.

“Sure Gideon will love to listen to your dramatic spiel about being bound to a criminal. Rest assured I have no intentions of pursuing this ridiculous thing, and neither do you.”

“Why not?”

Something about the innocent question makes Len’s blood pressure soar and he twists around, scowling at the idiot.

“Why not?!” he drawls sarcastically. “For one, because I don’t like _you_ , and you don’t like _me_ – you nearly fainted when Gideon told you. Seems like a pretty solid reason why _not_ , Raymond.”

He gets up to leave, because he’s still shaken by the fact that apparently, the universe seems to think that he and _Raymond Palmer_ , the time stream’s most diligent Boy Scout, are somehow a good match.

Fingers curl around his wrist and Len tenses, out of habit – it only irritates him more when he realizes that there is no wave of revulsion coiling in his stomach, the one he usually feels when strangers grab him out of the blue.

“Remember what happened the last time you did that?” he says, the calm in his voice completely fake as he stares at Raymond’s hand around his own.

“You’re not gonna punch me this time.”

It sounds like Raymond is certain about it, and Len hates to be predictable – one more reason why he’s not too fond of the idea of a goody-two-shoes soulmate like this guy. He doesn’t struggle, though: just lifts his eyes to Raymond’s sickeningly open face and frowns.

“C’mon, then, get it off your chest, whatever it is. Rip doesn’t hide his little amnesia pills as well as he thinks he does.”

It’s a challenge, an insult, a ‘whatever you have to say, I don’t intend to listen’ – but Raymond’s expression indicates that he chose to interpret it as a go-ahead.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing out of Boy Scout’s mouth, and it surprises Len enough that his frown gives way to an incredulous grimace.

“Unless I missed something, Raymond, this is not your fault.”

The man’s face darkens and he lets go of Len’s wrist – Len could leave now, leave Raymond with his self-pity and self-important guilt about the whole world.

He sits down on the crate next to Raymond instead, at a carefully measured distance.

“Actually… it is. I had a soulmate, before.”

That is shocking on its own: people don’t get second chances, as far as Len knows. Especially not flimsy, incompatible ones.

“Her name was Anna,” Raymond says, and Len refrains from sneering because he recognizes the pain of losing someone dear in the other man’s eyes and he’s not callous enough to mock that genuine sadness, “she died a few years back. We were engaged, and… for a while, when Rip asked me to join this team, I thought I could go back. Maybe I could change something, bring her back… but I couldn’t.”

Len wants to tell him how stupid an idea it was, but he knows he would’ve done the same had it been Lisa who died, and he also knows that Rip has not told them everything about changing the events of the past: after all, the former Time Master’s mission started with the wish to save his own family.

“What does that have to do with me?” he asks, and Raymond finally looks at him again.

“I did change something. Anna… she… I don’t think she’s just dead. I think she never existed. My soulmark started fading the day after the Pilgrim’s attack – I wondered if the Time Masters didn’t go further back and kill her mother, or her father. Then it reappeared the next day so I thought everything was alright. Now I think… it was you, wasn’t it? That was when your mark appeared.”

That sounds like an awful lot of half-formed hopes crushed before they were even fully born, and Len can’t find it in himself to lie, not to Palmer’s weirdly hopeful face. Len still doesn’t understand it – how can Raymond look at him like that, like he actually wants to _try_?

“’Time wants to happen’,” Len sneers, humorless, “isn’t that what our dear Captain always says? Maybe your soulmate will be saved in the end.”

His actual soulmate, not Len, who’s old and bitter and not at all inclined to accommodate someone as intense as Raymond into his life.

The idiot just looks at him, like he wants to read Len’s convoluted thoughts like a book, and shrugs.

“Yeah… but maybe, my time wants to happen with you, now. I’ve felt what it means to have a soulmate, Leonard – and if I can have that with you, if I can _be_ that for _you_ in return, then I don’t want to waste the time we have on thinking up reasons why we shouldn’t.”

It’s the sappiest, most ridiculous thing Len has ever heard. He hates how his whole body aches with the sudden want for that kind of a certainty. For far too long, his life has been carefully calculated seconds and improvising in order not to get killed or captured, and here he is, sitting on an old crate, on a time-ship, wondering how to say ‘no’ when he has to keep swallowing the ‘yes’ from the tip of his tongue.

“I’d like to think we can work,” Raymond says quietly, leaning just a little towards Len, like the simple sentence is something private, not meant for the 22nd-century walls or nosy AIs.

“You also like to think you’re Captain Kirk or John Wayne sometimes,” Len snaps, but his heart’s not in it.

He barely registers when Raymond’s hand captures his again – the touch feels like a question this time, tentative and almost fearfully light.

“Then I’ve certainly been more impossible things that your soulmate, don’t you think?”

That is how Len finds himself in a very unexpected soulbond – and in the eye of the gossip storm after Sara finds them kissing twenty minutes later.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://pheuthe.tumblr.com/).


End file.
